Short CV
Tabea Latocha has been research associate at the Institute of Human Geography since September 2021. She is currently pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Sebastian Schipper, focusing on feminist perspectives on the commodification and financialization of housing.
She completed her bachelor’s degree in Human Geography with a minor in Urban Design at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2017 and subsequently studied Urban Planning in a master’s program from 2018 to 2020 at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL), UK, and at the Bauhaus University Weimar.
Research focus
Her general research interests lie in Feminist and Applied Critical Geography (AKG) as well as interdisciplinary housing research. She is particularly interested in questions related to the intersection of housing issues and social reproduction.
Recent projects
PhD project within the framework of the DFG project “Home and Housing in Urban Regeneration Processes: Studying the Macro through Historiographies of the Micro in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Frankfurt am Main” (September 2021 to Spring 2025)
My current research project examines the complex tension between the exchange value and use value of housing as a commodity in social struggles over the commodification and financialization of formerly socially bound rental housing in Frankfurt am Main. The doctoral project aims to explore the macro-processes of neoliberalization and financialization “from below” from the perspective of the tenants from a political-economic perspective extended by feminist approaches. The focus of the research is on tenants’ everyday experiences and ways of dealing with the subjective pressure of displacement. Two workers’ housing estates in Frankfurt am Main, which were rented out as socially subsidized apartments until the abolition of non-profit housing in 1990, serve as case studies. In the meantime, the apartments have fallen out of public service and are managed for profit by new owners. Empirically, I am using qualitative methods to investigate 1) how housing management and rental conditions have changed since the abolition of public housing, 2) how residents experience this change in everyday life and 3) whether and how tenants defend themselves against subjectively experienced displacement pressure?